Financial Times kicks off trials to sell advertisers ‘blocks of time’ to tackle industry’s viewability issue | The Drum

May 22, 2014

The Financial Times is set to begin a new method of digital trading, selling blocks of time to advertisers in a bid to tackle the industry’s ad viewability problem.

The publisher has been trialling a method whereby the amount of time users are exposed to ads is measured and clients can buy inventory using a currency of ad time rather than ad space. The FT has been working with New York firm Chartbeat on developing the method and it expects it to launch fully in the fourth quarter of this year.

The FT’s commercial director of digital advertising and insight, Jon Slade, told The Drum that the IAB’s recently established standard viewability metric for display advertising was a welcome development, but that it didn’t go far enough.